System requirements

Node requirements

Linux kernel 3.10 or later with required dependencies.
The following distributions have the required kernel, its dependencies, and are
known to work well with Calico and OpenStack.

RedHat Linux 7

Ubuntu 16.04

CentOS 7

Key/value store

Calico v3.1 requires a key/value store accessible by all
Calico components.
If you don’t already have an etcdv3 cluster
to connect to, we provide instructions in the installation documentation.

Network requirements

Calico requires the network to allow the following types of traffic.

Traffic

Protocol

Port

BGP

TCP

179

IPIP*

4

n/a

* If your compute hosts connect directly
and don’t use IPIP, you don’t need to allow IPIP traffic. Refer to Configuring
IP-in-IP for more information.

Tip: On GCE, you can allow this traffic using firewall rules. In AWS, use
EC2 security group rules.

OpenStack requirements

We aim to develop and maintain the Neutron driver for Calico
(networking-calico) so that its master code works with OpenStack master or any
previous release (back to Icehouse), on any operating system, independently of
the deployment mechanism that is used to install it.

However, we recommend using OpenStack Newton or later, and our active support
and testing of Calico v3.1 with OpenStack is limited to
the following versions:

Ocata

Pike

Kernel dependencies

Tip: If you are using one of the recommended distributions, you will already
satisfy these.

nf_conntrack_netlink subsystem

ip_tables (for IPv4)

ip6_tables (for IPv6)

ip_set

xt_set

ipt_set

ipt_rpfilter

ipt_REJECT

ipip (if using Calico networking)

Nova patch needed with Mitaka and earlier

With OpenStack Mitaka and earlier, and if your libvirt is >= 1.3.3 and < 3.1,
you will need to patch the Nova code post installation, on each compute host,
as in this change. In case you
need the same Nova code to work with all possible libvirt versions, you should
then add this further change.
OpenStack Newton and later already include these two changes.